


It all started with a Coffee stain

by sv962



Series: One does not simply say “I love you” [2]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Disappointed Amanda is disappointed, Elijah Kamski & Gavin Reed are Siblings, Eventual Fluff, Eventual Smut, Gavin Reed Not Being an Asshole, Gavin Reed is a Mess, M/M, Nines is a little horny in this one, Soft Upgraded Connor | RK900, TW for Gavin's Reed mentions of his past, Upgraded Connor | RK900 Has No Genitalia, and a rabid racoon, but it's minor in chapter 2, the boys don't know how to emote.exe, wireplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:54:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23499346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sv962/pseuds/sv962
Summary: “Forget the case, Nines. We’re taking the afternoon off today”“Detective, nobody takes half a day off to buy a new jacket”Gavin raised his eyebrows: “Well, you know how much I care about your opinion from zero to a hundred? Minus ten”.“Minus ten isn’t even part of the order of natural numbers! It wasn’t even in the premise!”
Relationships: Upgraded Connor | RK900/Gavin Reed
Series: One does not simply say “I love you” [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2051340
Comments: 33
Kudos: 388





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello there! This work is a 4 chapters fic (they'll be uploaded these days!)  
> As always, thanks for the lovely comments of appreciation and support you've left on my other fics and thanks for the kudos and bookmarks too!!! You're all precious!!!

Life had never been kind to RK900, and he knew it.

He was aware of being a model unlike any other.

He had been programmed to destroy Connor and eradicate deviance and he was well aware of all the limitations implanted in his design: he was incapable of smiling, expressing joy or pain, crying or laughing. His vocal modulator didn't allow fluctuations in his voice and his synthetic face muscles didn’t help him being expressive. His design seemed a downgrade when compared to Connor’s.

Despite everything, he didn’t feel anger towards his predecessor.

RK800-51 had freed him from Cyberlife Tower, offered him a roof to stay under, wrapped him in a blanket despite his incapability of feeling cold, and every night he would tuck him in like a human child in need of protection. Connor would smile at him, wirelessly connect with him whenever he feared he had a problem and offer his help even when it wasn’t strictly necessary.

He was worried about Nines' partnership with Detective Reed and on several occasions, he reminded him that he could change partner whenever he wanted to, he just had to say it and it would have been done in the blink of an eye.

“I don’t feel the need to”, Nines simply stated, wrinkling his eyebrows and casting a distracted glance at the detective, feet on the desk and phone in hand, an earpiece dangling from his ear that had Madonna’s ‘ _Like a Virgin_ ’ on loop, “Working with him puts a strain on my processors, but I’m confident I’ll find a way to adapt to his unpredictable behavior, sooner or later”.

He knew what Connor would tell him.

Somedays, he just sounded like a _broken record_ , as Lieutenant Anderson would say.

RK900 wasn’t programmed to adapt to humans.

The order to obey without question, fight androids and take as many bullets as possible had been imprinted on his circuits. He was built as a war machine, meant to be used in the Arctic conflict, which was why his chassis was stronger than the RK800’s, his processors faster and his pre-construction software on the field way more accurate than the other RK units.

He was built to kill, not protect.

Connor had never blamed him for his decisions, never told him that it was stupid to try to get to know his colleagues within the limits of the work environment, to taste small samples of strawberry milkshakes without apparent logical motivation or to serve coffee to the detective even though he wasn’t asked to.

He greeted his predecessor with a hint of a smile, a smirk that by now everyone in the bullpen had deemed as the android’s attempt to be kind. His LED, as blue as the morning sky, often helped to indicate his state of mind.

He slowly returned to his desk and, retracting the skin from his hand, he interfaced with the terminal.

“Man, that asshole is seriously that terrified that I’m gonna throw you in a dumpster?”

Gavin took off his earpiece and peeked at the android, who had just stopped writing a report to meet eyes with the detective.

“While I agree that the way Connor worries about me is exaggerated”, he said thoughtfully, scrutinizing the detective with his icy glaze, “I find it thoughtful that my predecessor -whom you still insist on calling 'asshole', tries in every way to protect my physical and psychological integrity. I can't blame him for failing to realize that your attitude, Detective, in the last months underwent a huge change. Though it's quite... childish, if I may say, to believe you'd be able to incapacitate me. You’d end up with something broken before you’d even realize”.

“Yes, yes– Yadda, yadda. You already told me you have a built-in martial arts combat module. I’ve seen my fair share of that”, Gavin waved his hand in midair, picking up a cup of warm coffee for himself, and took a sip, “You don’t need to make a show-off out of it.

“Too bad”, RK900 grinned and intertwined his fingers, leaning forward with his torso and lowering the tone of his voice to a whisper, “Yet I have seen more than once that my moves elicited reactions of blatant sexual excitement in you. I wonder why”.

Gavin jumped on his chair and coughed.

His jolt made half of the coffee spill from the cup and stain his jeans.

It wasn't Nines’ intention teasing the detective, but his analysis had never betrayed him, and it filled him with feelings of joy knowing that Gavin felt sexually attracted to him.

Sadly, he didn’t know what to do with the information.

RK900 was aware of his feelings of attraction too – _Connor reluctantly realized that his brother was hopelessly in love with him_ , but the unpredictability of the detective’s behavior made it way too difficult to pick a course of action. There were too many obstacles: Gavin hated androids ( _not as much as he did in their first month of partnership, but still–_ ) and he seemed to be interested in having relationships of sexual nature with male human beings.

And Nines...

Well, RK900 models weren’t _equipped_ with genital components. And he was part of a species that the detective could barely tolerate.

There was no way this could have worked.

“Phck!”, Gavin looked at his dirty pants, swearing noisily, letting his scream break through the department.

Agent Miller barely turned from the desk next to the detective's, shaking his head resolutely. Tina Chen was already snickering from the break room but it was from Lieutenant Anderson’s desk that came the loudest laugh. Connor had stared at this brother wide-eyed, his LED red, as if he had already caught the words that his successor had said before the accident.

“I’m sorry, Detective”, the RK900 handed him a tissue, but Gavin yanked his hand and took it out of his fingers, “You can say it, tin can! Holy shit, these jeans cost me a fortune! I expect you to pay for my dry cleaning bill!”.

“I could get you a new pair”.

Gavin tilted his head, studying the android. When he noticed the genuine RK900’s offer, he just turned his back on him: “Forget it”.

He retrieved a couple of keys from the top desk drawer and stuck them in his pocket before turning off the terminal.

“I have some spare clothes in the locker and there’s a laundromat nearby. Not that I'm that enthusiastic about wasting my launch break there”.

He stood up and made a run for the locker room.

When Nines felt a hand on the back of his Cyberlife jacket, he noticed that Agent Miller had come to talk to him.

He felt some sort of affection towards him. Chris Miller was one of the few people who wasn’t scared to death by the android nor tried to avoid him as if he could be incinerated by his stare.

“What did you do to Reed?”, the officer asked him, “Until a few months ago, he would get up from his desk and start screaming like a rabid raccoon. Man, you sure you're an investigative model? I could have sworn you’re built to be a psychologist or, I don’t know, a lion tamer. You sure worked miracles on him”.

RK900 frowned and lowered his shoulders.

“I don’t know”, he admitted more confused than ever, hands resting on his thighs, squeezing the rough fabric of the jeans, “Honestly, Agent Miller, I’m not even an investigative model. I was built to be employed in the army, so I wouldn’t be surprised if my resilience is due to my programmers’ intent to make me more resistant to deviance or a form of adaptation necessary to perpetuate my existence and my work in this department. Probably, it’s the latter. That man is going to be the death of me”.

The detective was on his way to returning to his desk a few minutes later, sporting a clean pair of jeans and holding in a recyclable bag the dirty ones.

Nines looked at Miller and shyly grinned.

“But I wouldn’t change a single thing of Detective Reed for anything in this world. I’m glad to have him as my partner, even though he _sometimes_ acts like a rabid raccoon”.

Gavin put with a hand in his pocket and, with a quick nod, pointed the android to follow him.

RK900 silently obeyed and took his leave, greeting the officer.

As they left the department, he could feel his brother’s confused eyes on him and could vaguely picture his circular LED in perpetual yellow, like a lighthouse in the night.

If Connor had any questions, he would answer them later.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for depiction of violence in Gavin's flashbacks.

RK walked next to the detective, keeping his hasty pace.

When Gavin unlocked the car and opened the door, he was surprised by his invitation to enter.

It wasn’t the first time they traveled together: they often used Gavin’s car rather than the patrol one to reach crime scenes, yet it was a pleasant experience to sit in the worn, fifteen-year-old seats, and take advantage of the detective’s focus when driving to spy on the details of the interior or what was punctually left in the back seats.

Cat hairs were everywhere, other times he could spot a gym bag sitting in the back seats, a thermos filled with coffee and a leather spare jacket similar to the one the detective usually wore.

However, there was something that had caught his attention in the last months, a constant in the detective's car: the presence of a rather dull ring binder. At a quick analysis, it looked like it contained more than two hundred pages, but the absence of cues of any kind couldn't really help him understand its contents.

“What’s wrong with you, tin can. You’re awfully quiet”, Gavin held the leather steering wheel with both his hands.

The rough, scratched surface of the wheel, with the presence of residual epidermal material in the small grooves, indicated the detective’s nervous habit of scratching the wheel whenever he felt anxious or distraught, just as he was doing right now. He must have noticed that the android was watching way too much and talking too little.

“I was wondering what’s that binder about”, the detective’s pout told him he’d probably do better to just shut up.

He closed his hands in fists and tucked at the jeans’ cloth, “Of course, you’re not obliged to tell me, detective. I don’t want to pry or make you uncomfortable”.

"Shut up. You’re not making me uncomfortable”.

He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and, after a deafening silence during which RK was able to record the detective’s heartbeat rising to 110 bpm, Gavin pressed the accelerator as the traffic light turned green.

The android waited, trying to remember Agent Miller’s praise for his patience.

“It’s, um”, the steering wheel creaked under his slightly sweaty grip, and Gavin found suddenly much more interesting watching the road rather than obsessively glancing at the reflection of the passenger’s window to check his partner’s LED, “It’s your instruction manual. I printed a copy with the most salient parts”.

RK raised an eyebrow.

He remembered emailing it to the detective after a week of partnership, but that went beyond his imagination and preconstructions.

His neck pinched, a hint of arousal he was way too familiar with in Gavin’s presence, a tension he had so far only been able to alleviate by opening the back of his nape port and touching the connections until he reached the input overload, replacing his fingers with the detective’s in his mind palace, emulating Gavin's voice to hear things that anyone who had known the detective knew he wouldn’t say even on his deathbed or with a gun pointed to his temple.

“Why were you reading my manual, detective?”

His system was about to start the blushing routine, but Nines was quick enough to stop it before his cheeks turned blue. It wasn’t the best moment to show Gavin that that gesture touched his most intimate chords.

Gavin could have read his manual for a hundred different reasons.

And getting a word out of the detective wouldn’t have been easy.

“You know”, he stalled, squeezing the steering wheel in his hands, and RK could already see the heartbeats rising and the sweat perspiring from his palms, leaving tracks on the leather.

What would he had given to lick it and sample it.

He would have sucked clean the detective’s palms, let Gavin’s rough, calloused fingers mess up his hair, taste the detective’s lips, shut his mouth whenever he said something idiotic, catch his tongue and suck it, sample it until it was free of any trace of saliva and go down to savoring the neck, the Adam’s apple, his clavicles, sternum, nipples, abs, navel, kissing the scars scattered along the body, his moles and every trait of–

“...and then, honestly, you’re always glorifying Connor because you say that no matter how much you’re built to be better than him, you’ll never be on his level. And you know what, tin can? Screw it, you don’t have to prove anything to your brother”.

This time, he couldn’t stop the blushing on his face in time.

His cheeks had visibly turned blue and now that the car had stopped in front of the laundromat, RK suddenly felt more nervous.

So caught up in his preconstruction software, in his desire to have his hands all over the detective’s body, he had totally neglected the inputs of his audio processors and if Gavin told him why he printed his manual, he probably missed it.

“Do you think I need to prove anything to Connor?”, he shyly asked, trying to hang on to the last sentence he heard.

“I don’t know”, said the detective, shaking his shoulders, “You’re always asking him for advice on how to deal with people as if you’re waiting for his blessing or for him to give you the divine solution to all your problems. Phck, what do you think socializing is about? Rocket-science?! Nines. If people like you, fine. If they don’t like you, it’s not the end of the phcking world. And if your brother pisses you off with his almighty attitude, you just tell him to phck off”.

He got the bag from the car and took the manual with him.

The laundromat was desolate at that hour.

He picked the smallest washer he could find and threw the pants in.

Thirty minutes of waiting.

RK couldn’t help but think that for a pair of pants, thirty minutes was a huge waste of water, detergent and fabric softener. By _rA9_ , how polluting that was.

Before the detective could start the washing cycle, the android took off his Cyberlife-issued jacket and put it in inside the drum along with the jeans. He’d never washed it before. Maybe he could finally understand what his predecessor found special about the smell of clean clothes.

The detective raised an eyebrow.

It looked like he wanted to say something, but when RK was about to pay, Gavin slapped his hand – _he grit his teeth as he realized how much that hurt his fingers. He forgot way too often that Nines' skin was only soft on the surface_. He massaged his hand and silently swiped his card on the automatic cash. As his payment got processed, he sat down in front of the washing machines.

In his hands, there was still the manual.

“Do you want to read it?”, joked Gavin, offering him the ring binder.

The android’s LED glowed yellow.

“Why? I know my specifics”.

"I kNoW My SpECIfiCs", Gavin mocked him.

Nines sighed.

“I'm starting to doubt you're a grown man”, he said as he took hold of the folder.

Gavin laughed it off with a satisfied smile. He had managed to make the android do what he wanted, without considering the possibility that the RK900 indulged him out of pure pity.

On the other hand, Nines stopped asking himself what his code found interesting in such a human disaster. Well, at least he could read something to distract himself from the detective’s glaze that scrutinized his body, his black shirt and high collar, as if he had never seen him before.

Truth was, without his jacket RK hadn’t calculated how exposed and vulnerable he was feeling. His back was uncovered and the region of his chest where a human would have nipples was only shielded by a thin layer of cotton shirt.

Gavin blatantly failed at being stealth as he stared at him. He tended to forget way too often how little he could go unnoticed by a military model android. Save for when said android was completely absorbed in its erotic preconstruction software.

Nines took the manual in his hands and he was almost surprised to find a sheet of paper with a giant doodle of his face above the title.

Under the header “ _Instruction Manual for Android model RK-900_ ”, Gavin added in red marker, in his own handwriting “ _Gavin’s manual on how to handle said phckin’ android_ ”.

The words vaguely made him grin.

He flipped through the next pages and immediately realized that the detective’s manual was nothing more than a review of the original file.

Gavin stood at his side with his arms folded.

He watched the way the android flipped through the manual, and RK felt like this was the closest the detective ever let him in.

Gavin had been watching him for months and seemed to know and notice aspects of the android that usually went unnoticed. The manual was a collection of his thoughts, of how to behave or not around the RK900.

At page 53, he expressively wrote: “ _He doesn’t know how to communicate, has no sense of humor, lacks aDEquAte SoCiaL proTocoLs –_ looked like he almost attempted to make a written impression of him _, but he doesn’t suck up to his colleagues like that puppy dog-eyed asshole. He looks like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands so he just keeps them over his thighs or hidden behind his back. He’s shy AF. People think he’s a killer machine. Man, you gotta be blind or a phcking idiot to think he’d even hurt a fly_ ”.

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me, Detective”, RK photographed the page with his optical units and saved it to his memory, keeping the file in the encrypted [ **Det. Gavin Reed** ] folder. He would view that whenever he thought he wasn’t deviant enough or good enough for the department or for his own partner.

Gavin averted his gaze, deeply blushing, and crossed his legs on the chair.

“Um”, he cleared his voice, fluctuating his green irises between the washing machine’s porthole, _his pants and the android’s monochromatic jacket spinning in a whirlwind of soap_ , and RK’s blue, almost icy eyes as he held the manual in his hands like a relic, “You know– I told you. You always over-think stuff. You have this urge to compare yourself to Connor all the time, and I don’t want to say it’s bad. He’s your older brother, he’s important to you and probably you look up to him and whatever, it’s just that–”

“Are you afraid I’m letting him influence my decisions?”, RK asked, closing the manual.

This seemed enough to shake the detective out of his ruminations.

“No, no!”, he jumped in his chair, slightly defensive, “I didn’t mean that. It’s just that sometimes older brothers take advantage of their position just to be assholes. You know, under the guise of being protective, they end up sticking their noses in your life and not leaving you alone”.

RK tilted his head and felt like the detective wasn’t talking about the android anymore.

It wasn’t the first time Gavin showed to have some trouble with ‘ _siblings_ ’, but approaching an intimate topic like family with a complex man like him would be difficult.

He stroked the cover of the ring binder and placed his hands over it.

“Connor doesn’t have an intrusive attitude towards my living choices”, he said after a long silence.

The laundromat door open and a boy with a loaded laundry basket bent over to fill a washing machine. He seemed not to pay too much attention to the detective and the android.

“I mean”, added Nines, “Connor is intrigued by my choices, he listens to my opinions but gives me advice only when I ask him to. He’s emphatic and caring and–”

“God, what is he to you? Jesus Christ, the Redeemer?”, Gavin waved his hands and adjusted on the chair, this time sitting on one leg, and looked at the android straight in the eyes, “Listen, now your brother isn’t around. There must be something you can’t stand about Connor. You can say that here”.

RK frowned his eyebrows, LED suddenly yellow.

That seemed enough for Gavin to take the initiative.

“OK, I’ll start then. But you’re next, you’re warned”.

He cleared his voice and crossed his arms.

“My brother’s an asshole”, he smiled when he saw the android staring at him in dismay, surprised by his admission, the most secretive man in the department talking to his partner about a family member, “He’s got an awful God-complex, and that just because he’s one hell of a lucky son of a bitch! My achievements? All dust compared to his”.

RK looked at him in disbelief, but when the detective stopped talking, he realized it was his turn. Gavin reached out his hand, hoping that would give him the courage to start speaking.

“My... predecessor is a good person”, he began, LED yellow, “But... I must admit sometimes he’s suffocating. He thinks I always need to be protected and he treats me as if I constantly need his guidance”. He lowered his head and felt a hint of shame: “Sometimes, I feel jealous of him. Because everyone in the department just loves him, no one avoids social interactions with him and the other androids aren’t afraid of being killed by a single glance”.

Gavin smiled and leaned with an elbow on the chair, visibly more relaxed, taking upon his turn.

“I think my brother has done everything in his life to bust my balls. When I had trouble doing my math and physics homework in high school, he would offer to tutor me if I helped him with his stupid experiments.

In the end, thanks to a mistake of mine in mixing two chemical components, the asshole managed to make a living out of it and since then, he’s done nothing but filling my phone with photos of his creations and his successes, phcking messages that only remind me that he was disgustingly rich at only eighteen”.

“Not to pry man, but you’re a lucky son of a bitch too”, the boy, who had been silent until then, looked at the detective with his eyebrows raised, “I’d sign for a brother like that! Holy shit, you’re rich as shit”.

“Hey, do I look rich to you? If I had even one-tenth of his money, I probably wouldn’t be washing my fucking pants in a laundromat two miles away from where I work, would I?!”

“Uh. Touché”, the guy shook his head, scratched his goatee and swung his eyes between the android and the detective. He went back to his phone and put on his earphones.

Nines was suddenly intrigued by his story.

Gavin had no siblings according to the registry office, at least no one related to the surname “Reed”. There were no billionaires in the world who responded to that name, his mother Diane Reed had passed away in 2013 and he apparently had no father. He took his surname after his mother.

Gavin had no close relatives – _his maternal uncle had died of an overdose in January 2002, and the brother he spoke of was non-existent at the registry office_.

Yet he hadn’t detected any indicators of lying in the detective’s face.

In Gavin’s silence, there was an invitation to open up.

Their discussion had suddenly become a mutual exchange of experiences.

The only way he could get to known Gavin was by gifting him a piece of himself, his most private thoughts and his valuable and controversial opinions.

He would have never imagined he could bond with Gavin over a subject like brothers.

“I’m so envious of Connor”, he began this time, striving to replace the word ‘predecessor’, “because I was supposed to be the more advanced model. I was supposed to be his improved version, on paper I’m his ‘upgrade’, _it’s even on my model name and on my damn jacket!_ And yet I don’t have advanced social protocols, I had to learn everything from scratch, I scare people, I intimidate them, I can’t smile, I can’t cry, they decided to build me before the company went down and my programmers, when they created my code, probably thought: “Hey, you know what? Screw it! As long as this robot takes bullets like a tank, we’re done! Why do we even bother with its code! We don’t have to program an android capable of smiling, crying or fucking! He’s got to be the best soldier ever created!”. Jericho didn’t even want me! Connor insisted on freeing me even though he was terrified the first time he met me! If androids could defecate, he probably would have shat himself!”.

" _Holy fucking shit!_ "

Gavin and Nines both stared at the boy next to them. As the guy saw both their death glares, he immediately put his earpiece on.

“Listen, my father didn’t want me either. I was his lovechild, when he came to my mom’s house it was just for a quickie while I was in the yard playing with my brother. When mum died, the pig took me with him just so he wouldn’t piss off my brother. Damn, Lij would have killed him if something happened to me. That stinking bastard died of syphilis in 2018. A more than deserved death, in my opinion”.

RK frowned: “What about your brother? Wasn’t he sorry for his death?”

“My brother had other things on his mind in those years. And he hated our father. Man was a drunkard. He’d come home drunk from work, reeking of booze, and eat whatever he could get his hands on. He’d smash things, he’d scream furiously, he’d barely shower and he'd pass out in the living room in a pool of urine. He wasn’t even mentally sound most of the time. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve hated the stench of alcohol. That’s why I couldn't forgive Anderson for turning into an alcoholic.

Man, too many bad memories. You know... we used to get along before... before what happened.

He was the kind of decent father I never had. I didn't want to live through hell once again, so I just decided to hate him and hope that he would die a pig's death, like our father did.

I'm always saying that your brother is an asshole, but I gotta give him credit for turning Hank into a functional human being again”.

He pressed his fingers against each other. The anger was suddenly gone and all that memory had left was his scar.

“You know... truth is my brother is an ass. A first-rate idiot. He brags ‘cause his IQ is over 170, but I can’t understand how someone that smart could even think of arguing with a man incapable of intent and will like that drunken bastard was. The pig was about to smash a glass bottle over his head. He would have been dead for good if I didn't take the blow for him. The nose? It's the tip of the iceberg. God knows the scars you'd see if I was bald”.

“You... took the hit for your brother?”, RK looked at him in shock.

The scar that Gavin was terribly aware of, _that he was ashamed of_ – did he actually get it by protecting his brother?

How many other scars he had that he desperately tried to hide from people? How much sufferance?, what burdens he had been carrying along during all his life?

The washer rang and the detective got up to get the android’s jacket and his jeans.

He froze instantly, staring at the inside of the drum in dismay.

“Um, Nines. You’re not gonna like what you’re about to see”.

The android jumped up and when he reached the detective, he looked with a different kind of shock at what had happened. He stroked his precious jacket and the red LED seemed to alarm even his partner.

“Gavin. Why it’s blue”, he asked paralyzed, with the soft, lavender-scented fabric in his hands, “Why is my jacket, my precious jacket–”.

“Because neither one of us thought that you don’t put white and blue together without first putting color-catching sheets inside the washer”.

RK lowered his head and his despair was so evident that even within his expressive limits, Gavin understood perfectly what he was feeling. He soothed his back and comforted the android by drawing circles with his palm, as if to comfort a child, hoping that the android wouldn’t realize that behind the detective’s attempt at comforting him, there was also an excuse to touch him.

“Go on, throw it in the dryer. We’ll come up with something for your jacket”.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, for the comments, kudos and support!!! Chapter 3 will be up soon!!!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your supporting comments, kudos and bookmarks!  
> I'm so glad you're liking the story!!! *throws kudos*

“Detective, where are we headed? It’s almost 2 p.m. We have to be back at the office in 12 minutes to conclude the report on case 39-1-1598-5”.

“For God’s sake, is it so hard for you to just call it ‘ _the case of the guy who tied his dick to a car trailer to win a bet_ ’?”

A fairly idiotic case, in Gavin’s humble opinion.

Victim John Trevors bet that if he tied his meat to the tow bar of his friend’s car, it wouldn’t pop off. His logic was based on the simple fact that if hair could withstand up to two tons of weight, so there was no reason a penis couldn’t do the same.

God, if people had _way too much spare time_.

So, long story short, the guy was dragged around by his friend's car, held by his flaccid meat, until his willy took off like a pen cap after the first turn.

The result soon was a dick on the loose tied to a car that crashed a few miles later against the window of a pet shop while the corpse of a young and evirated John Trevors was found in a pool of blood, at the roots of a tree in a public park.

Damn.

He, Tina and Hank have been laughing at that for hours.

“No report”, he giggled before the android could argue, “We’ll deal with the suspect tomorrow. Besides, I guess it won’t hurt him to spend another day in the cell. Maybe he can meditate on what he did and be thankful for still having his dick attached, unlike his friend”.

He grinned amusedly when he saw the android shake his head.

“It would have been easier for him if he was an android”, he simply added RK.

“I guess”, nodded Gavin, “his dick would have come off and he’d be fine by now”.

He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel before curling his lips, “Well”, he added thoughtfully, “except his friend. His friend would have crashed like an asshole into the pet shop anyway. Luckily, he didn’t run someone over, that bloody bastard”.

RK kept his hands on his thighs.

Ever since he found out that his partner noticed his tendency to lock them in fists, he was suddenly more aware of his actions. He closed his eyes and tried to avoid thinking about the protracted absence of his precious jacket to cover his shoulders.

He could have explained to the detective that, except for the Traci models and the RK800-51, there weren’t androids standardly equipped with genitals. Certainly, some androids could install the components if they wished to – _they were predisposed to do so_ , but Nines was sufficiently sure that there was no such hardware compatible with his software.

The thought caused him a wave of discomfort, but he kept his ruminations to himself when he heard the detective’s voice.

“Forget the case, Nines. We’re taking the afternoon off today”.

“Detective, nobody takes half a day off to buy a new jacket”.

Gavin raised his eyebrows in a defiant glance: “Well, you know how much I care about your opinion from zero to a hundred? Minus ten”

“Minus ten isn’t even part of the order of natural numbers! It wasn’t even in the premise!”

RK loved that human, but he needed a sound explanation. How was it possible that such a person had a brother with an IQ over 170?!

Perhaps there were mysteries destined to remain unsolved.

“Listen”, Gavin began again, sliding his hands along the leather surface of the steering wheel, but this time visibly more comfortable, perhaps because of the discussion in the laundromat, “You haven’t taken a day off since you joined the department, have you? And I’ve accumulated so many days off that the department refuses to pay them. It’s a win-win situation. You just relax and take out that giant stick you have up your ass 24/7. I’ll take care of the rest”.

“But we’re on our way to Belle Isle. We’re going towards Cyberlife Tower”, the android gazed at him horrified, LED suddenly red, and tightened his seatbelt with all his might, menacing to rip it with his strength, “Gavin, are you taking me to Cyberlife?!”.

“For God’s sake, will you be quiet?! Nobody’s taking you to Cyberlife!”, Gavin raised his voice and tapped his hand on the wheel, “You get what I’m talking about?! Can’t you _just_ relax for once?! Jesus, relax! Lean back in the phcking seat, look at the scenery, solve the Millennium Problems or whatever you androids do in your spare time, but relax! We’re not going to Cyberlife, I’m not bringing you in for repairs and we’re absolutely not going somewhere shady!”.

RK frowned and studied him carefully.

Gavin wasn’t lying.

He knew about his fear of repairs. It was rational to believe he would never hurt him. Yet-

“Sorry”, he added in a whisper, loosening his grip on the seat-belt and putting his hands back on his thighs, in tight fists, “I have bad memories of Cyberlife. I should never have seen what happened during the experiments they did on my body before wiping my memory, but in the interfaces with Connor, sometimes stuff just... overflows... and... I’m so afraid it’s going to happen again, I’m so scared they could–”.

The detective took his hand off the wheel and covered the android’s with his own. He smiled softly as he felt the skin retract, revealing the milky, smooth, artificial chassis.

“Hey, it’s in the past, tin can”, he squeezed his hand slightly, as if to make him feel his closeness, “You can’t forget things in an overnight. Sometimes it takes time, sometimes you’ll never be able to forget them and they’ll haunt you forever. I know it’s not comforting. But you just have to think that it’s in the past and it will never happen again, okay? As long as Connor and Hank are around, nobody’s gonna do anything to you. And the first one who turns you into a poodle who lives to please others will be graced by my fist in their face”.

RK kept the detective’s hand among his own.

“I... feel safer already”, he whispered, this time without hiding the blue of his cheeks.

In the silence and quietness of the car, he felt exquisitely happy. The regulator of his thirium pump made a buzzing noise. He wasn’t sure whether it was audible to the human ear or not, but he was relieved that his black shirt covered the blue lighting of the regulator.

He listened to the detective and asked no questions, doing as he was instructed.

He relaxed, listened to the music on the radio, the playlist of Cascada hits from the first decade, Lady Gaga’s _Bad Romance_ and Madonna’s _Like a Virgin_. It seemed to be one of the detective's favorites.

Suddenly, Tomboy’s ‘ _It’s okay to be Gay_ ’ started playing too, but the detective didn’t look embarrassed about it.

He sang it at the top of his lungs, laughing and giggling the whole time.

“The video is great”, he said in a radiant smile, “You gotta check it out. The gay dog is definitely my favorite. And man, the fight between the Straights and the Gays? Love it. That video is pure gold”.

RK grinned and let out a sigh: “Detective, you have very questionable tastes”.

“My tastes are very singular. You wouldn’t understand”.

The android raised an eyebrow in front of the human’s growing grimace.

He remained silent for a few seconds before answering: “Enlighten me then”.

Perhaps everything could have expected less than Gavin’s fat laugh, the way he exploded giggling at his words, spitting on the dashboard and opening his mouth wide until his teeth showed. And honestly, Nines had never been caught up in his genuine laugh as he was now, wanting so much to kiss him, hold him, unbuckle his seatbelt and jump to his side, recline the seat and have the detective under him until he had cataloged every corner of his mouth.

His brother had called him “ _hopelessly in love_ ”.

Well, it wasn’t that far-fetched.

When the detective took a completely deserted side road, RK was tempted to believe that he was really looking for a secluded spot.

The now-vanished fear had been replaced by agitation and anticipation.

Maybe something would happen, maybe Gavin would pull over and give him that kiss that Nines had been dreaming of for months, maybe he would tell him that he felt the same way, maybe they would exchange passionate bodily fluids, throw themselves in the backseat and he could touch Gavin until he had brought him to orgasm, maybe–

The wheels of the car slid on the gravel.

The detective quickly pulled the handbrake and nailed the car just few meters before crashing into a bush.

The engine died.

“Argh, good thing I didn’t break any shock absorbers this time either. Phcking road. He’s a billionaire and he won’t even pay for fixing this mess”.

The RK900 looked at the detective and then glanced straight ahead.

Maybe he really needed to know what they were doing in Elijah Kamski’s property.

“Don’t make that hallucinated face. What are you waiting for? Did you glitch or something?”

Gavin waved his hand in front of his face, but he didn’t seem to pay too much attention to his inexpressiveness.

RK900 was undoubtedly the most advanced prototype ever built but this – _Detective Gavin Reed’s knowledge of the location of Elijah Kamski’s isolated house, his nonchalance about that, speaking as if he had visited the place before_ \- by rA9, THIS was totally beyond his comprehension. And he wouldn’t lie: his processors couldn’t understand why this human kept testing him.

If his programmers believed they could enslave the world with a single RK900, God, they obviously didn’t take into account the existence of Gavin Reed, the human being who defied logic and numbers. Maybe because he ignored them or maybe because, as he had demonstrated before, he literally didn’t know fucking shit about how that stuff worked.

Asking him questions wouldn’t have helped.

Following him was the only way to figure out where he was aiming.

If Lieutenant Anderson had shown up at Kamski’s residence on one day’s notice and was able to get in because of his curiosity about the RK800, maybe Gavin thought he could do the same by exploiting the uniqueness of the only functional RK900 unit ever built.

He followed the ramp leading to the entrance and stood silently behind him.

The detective dangled on the soles of his shoes before pressing the doorbell. The rhythm of his breathing increased dramatically along with his heartbeat, sweating and sudden nervousness returning. After a few seconds of waiting, he could hear him twist his mouth and press the doorbell more insistently.

“Detective, I don’t know why we’re here, but Elijah Kamski isn’t the kind of person who welcomes visitors. Without a specific reason, he’ll never open–”

He couldn’t finish the sentence.

An RT600 opened the door and, _by rA9_ , he could have sworn that her LED had glowed red before her shiny lips bent into a tender smile.

RK900 had never seen an android like her smiling so sweetly.

“Gavin!”, she said almost dazzling with enthusiasm, “What a nice surprise. What brings you here?”.

The detective scratched the back of his head, curling his hair between rough fingers.

“Hey Chloe”, he mumbled between his lips, looking down, “I took the afternoon off to keep Nines company. I thought maybe Lij could, I don’t know–”.

“Elijah’s in the lab, but I can call him for you right now. Maybe you could help him”, the android winked at him and left the door open for them to enter.

However, Gavin didn't have time to reply.

The invitation to make himself at home had already been forwarded and he could feel his partner’s erratic and lost walk at his heels.

The stained glass windows of the house reflected everywhere the inconstant and irregular circling of his LED, _red, red, yellow and red_ , while he analyzed everything, from the photograph of Kamski and Amanda Stern at the university to the stylized statue of an android in the center of the entrance to the giant picture hanging on the wall of the photo printed on the cover of the “ _Man of the Century_ ” magazine.

“How could I ever overlook that”, said Nines after a long silence, as he proceeded to analyze closely all the smallest details of the man’s face, to compare them with the detective’s, “It was idiotic of me not to consider that...”, he tilted his head a little, now framing the face of his colleague, “You have the same ears”.

His words seemed to strike at Gavin’s heart. The embarrassment he had been hiding under the carpet up until then had suddenly started creeping up to his cheeks, deep crimson.

“Shut up or I’ll throw you in the pool”, he grunted, slurring his words between his teeth.

RK exhaled and started relaxing.

He brought his hands behind his back and when he heard footsteps coming from an adjacent room, he straightened up, trying to look as professional as possible. It was in his code and, unintentionally, the comparison with Connor had loomed over his head again.

When the door opened wide, Kamski emerged in a completely different outfit he had welcomed his brother and Lieutenant Anderson with.

His creator was wearing casual clothes. The goatee wasn’t trimmed and he wore a pair of glasses with square lenses. On his hands, there were traces of thirium. Unregistered model, though.

It didn’t take too long before he hugged the detective, holding him in an almost suffocating embrace.

“Gav!”, he shouted in surprise, now that Chloe had returned boasting the tender smile that RK900 was all too aware he could never replicate, “What an unexpected visit!”.

The eyes of his creator inevitably shifted to him.

His pupils shone with interest.

“And RK900! Man, how lucky I am today”, the smile seemed to bend for an instant in a sneer of satisfaction. RK could vaguely understand where his partner’s mocking and bastardly teasing expressions came from. It had to be genetic – _there was no other explanation_.

“Don’t mind me, Mr. Kamski. I’m just accompanying Detective Reed”, he held his hands behind his back, desperately hoping his LED wouldn’t betray his nervousness. In that unusual family reunion, he felt as out of place as when he spent evenings at the Andersons household watching movies and Connor sat too close to the Lieutenant, one hand on his leg, dangerously close to the erogenous zones of a male human being.

Kamski watched him with intrigue, with a scrutinizing gaze. In the end, it was the detective himself who saved him before Nines could panic.

“What were you doing in the lab?”, no matter how disinterested he wanted to look, there was something that betrayed interest and curiosity in his partner’s eyes.

Gavin said his brother hated the tendency to involve him in his experiments, but RK had a vague hunch that Gavin hadn’t asked the question just to save him from his analyzing stare.

Kamski showed him his blue hands, sporting a grin full of satisfaction.

“Something totally innocent”, he shrugged, “Don’t make that look! I know very well that androids are people now, I’m not building a servant, little brother”.

“Don’t call me little brother”.

“Chloe and the girls keep me company -I love them, but I need someone to blame me when I make mistakes”.

“Oh, sweet Jesus. You’re going nuts. Gotta mark the date on the calendar. Our Lord and Savior Elijah _phcking_ Kamski has just admitted that he makes mistakes”, Gavin mocked him, now with folded arms, “So what? You decided to create your clone, infuse it with your own God-complex and join forces to become the smartest beings on Earth?”.

“Nah, at that point I would have done better to create a replica of you”, replied his brother, “But your brain defies the laws of logic and trying to capture your personality in numbers is like forcing a rabid raccoon to tango while juggling seventeen balls made of lead”.

RK raised an eyebrow.

“I’m glad to know that someone feels the same way about him”, he added.

Gavin lifted his middle finger, “Phck you both. I don’t want an android version of me. This nightmare has been haunting me for 20 years and I have no intention of seeing it realized!”.

“I wouldn’t replace you for anything in the world, Gav”, Kamski smiled, “I’m not making any clone of me either. I’m just working on an A.I.”.

He scratched his goatee and fixed his glasses, lost in thought.

“Hm, let’s say I’m actually... fixing it”, he added this time, looking at Chloe, “The body is there but I don’t know if we’re making progress or not with the personality. No matter how hard I try to fix it, she always seems too bitchy and fussy to me. It’s like the code itself is rebelling to me”.

“An artificial intelligence rebels against your insistence to fix its personality”, Gavin snickered at his face, “What can I say. The right punishment for inventing the code for deviance”.

“She got deviant without my consent!”

“Yes, that’s what happens to everyone who works with you. You know, I wasn’t gonna tell you this, but you’re a pain in the ass. What were you trying to fix? Chloe’s code? You were trying to make her the perfect girl for yourself?”

“Please”, Kamski slipped his hands in his pockets and waved at them.

Kamski’s house was definitely huge, and it was surprising finding out that Gavin seemed to know some of it by heart, as if he’d been visiting his brother long enough to know where the lab and the kitchen were. When the door to the basement opened, Kamski burst in trepidation.

“Welcome to paradise!”, he bowed, giving the precedence to his brother, “Women first”.

Gavin walked past him, exchanging a death glare with him: “The day I snap, you’re the first to go”.

RK confusedly stared at him but there was no bite in Gavin’s words.

He decided to just ignore him and hesitantly moved forward.

The lab was white and sterile.

The walls seemed to be soundproof and a round platform with lifting arms with 360-degree freedom of rotation was located in the center of the room while on one side was a reclining stainless steel table.

His stress levels increased dramatically.

White, white, _white_.

Too many memories.

His testing phase.

The gamma radiation his chassis had been exposed to.

The electrocution. The acid baths. The high temperatures.

The fire. The deafening cold of the ice.

His demolished social protocols. The tears he could no longer shed overnight.

The emotions.

The pain.

The fear.

Ť̴̡̡̰̺͎͎̮͎̖̊̽̚h̵̦̗͗e̴̦͍̣̿͒ ̷̧̝̜̈́͊͐̌̄͘̚͜͠͝f̵̖̥̰͉̋́̇̐̕͜ę̴̙̻̞͔̈́̂͜a̴̭͋̄͛̄͝͠ŗ̷̯͖͛͂̆̽̔̈́

G̴̩̏a̷̖͠v̴̨̿ḯ̴̜n̶̯̏.̴̣̓

W̴̠̜͓̯͆̋̈̔̽h̵̥̥͓͕̠̿͑̋ê̶̗̯̪̙r̷̤̬̭̒̈́ê̴̡̨̱͂͒͜ͅ ̵̫̎͒̕ä̸̧͎͉̌͌r̸̢̡̄e̷͎̫̝̩͑͜ ̴̠̹͇̲̔ͅy̷̢̜͕͌͆̆͠͠o̴̲͓̣̪͉̔ų̸̬̥̗̀͑͜,̵̝̹̈́̓ ̷̨̬̼͙̪̈́G̸͎̗̣͖͌͌̐͛̒a̶͍͈̋̇̐̾v̴̟̙̯̼͂̉̍ͅỉ̶͓̉͝ñ̸̡̯͍̹͙̋?̴̨̧̦̖̣͒̃̌͋͂

“Nines”.

His hands made immediate contact with the warmth of the detective’s human hands.

Sweat. Heat.

The detective's heartbeats detectable by his grip, the higher temperature of his body, the hormones he was perspiring. Oh, so much cortisol. Gavin was stressed. And Nines was the cause of it. That was the worst, _he was the worst, he was being egoistic and_ –

“Hey, I’m here. Nobody’s gonna hurt you, Nines. I’m right here. Look at me. Focus on my hands, come on. Look at all the things that aren’t white. Look at me”, the detective’s voice was soothing, warm, loving, consoling.

Gavin suffered from panic attacks, it was something RK had discovered very early on in his line of work, but luckily the detective also knew how to handle them.

“Look at me, Nines. Think of Connor and the horrible shirts he wears on Sundays, that abhorrent shirt with toucans, think of that stupid St. Bernard drooling over his pants when he wants a treat, think of all the times Hank hides chocolate donuts under his jacket and Collins blows his cover, think of–”.

“Think about Gavin’s hands in your wires!”

Kamski’s words hit his hearing processors like a bolt out of the blue.

His attitude faked indifference, but his words were full of teasing. Sitting at his station, Kamski's eyes were fixed on his terminal, while all sorts of connectors came out of the android he had been working on, suspended by the mechanical arms.

Gavin angrily snapped at his brother: “Shut your mouth, Lij! He’s scared to death by repairs! It’s no joking matter!”

RK totally ignored the detective’s words.

Elijah Kamski wasn’t a detective but he certainly had an eye for detail, just like his brother. And though he still had yet to understand what gave away his obvious attraction to Gavin, he was more than certain that nothing could stop the embarrassment creeping up to his cheeks. He had turned blue. Blue as the sky, blue as the ocean, blue as his LED.

It had been a low blow.

“D̷̹̦̖̺̍̏̂̇͆o̵͔̟̞͋͆͌̍͜ṋ̸̮̊̈'̸͚̼̜̙͉̆͆̄͋̐t̵͕̤͔̖̼̐̚-”, his voice modulator glitched and it was too late to do something about it, “I would trust you, Gavin. I’d gladly accept your help. I’d be overflowed with so much information... And you wouldn’t even have the inconvenience of having thirium on your hands. It would be a win-win situation, as you would call it”.

The detective raised an eyebrow, more confused than ever.

“What?”

He would have gladly answered him, but Kamski impatiently grunted from his chair and stood up, momentarily leaving the computer.

“I’d really wish you two would get a room already, but unfortunately I need Nines here. That A.I. is pissing me off. I think making her interact with me is a waste of time, after all”, he put his hands back in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders, eyeing the android, “Are you in the mood for some small talk, Nines?”.

“My social protocols aren’t that developed, Mr. Kamski. I don’t think I’m the most suited person to chat with a developing artificial intelligence”.

Not to mention that he was more than busy with the hundreds of background preconstructions his system was processing on Gavin with his hands in the back of his neck, in a passionate exchange of DNA and thirium in every possible scenario: the back of the detective’s car, the bed in his apartment, the department bathroom, the office desk late at night, any guest room in Kamski’s own house.

“Meh, try it. It can’t get worse than this”, his creator seemed rather careless about it, “You can also interface with the terminal. I haven’t transferred her into the body yet so you won’t have the anxiety of physical contact”.

“What the phck, Lij! He just had a panic attack! Isn’t decency really part of your vocabulary?!”

“Hey, I’m working here, you know?”, Kamski remarked in a victorious smile, full of satisfaction as he urged the android to go to the terminal, “Come on, go Nines. Nothing will happen to you. I wouldn’t hurt you. Man, Gavin wouldn't think twice before putting a bullet in my forehead if anything happened to you. I don’t want to end up like Sixty. Bringing him back was such a pain. ...I mean, he's still a pain. He’s a pain, either dead or alive. Glad that Allen puts up with him”.

At the detective’s grunt, Kamski gave him a devilish smile.

“Oh, I see you’re making progress in controlling your tantrums. If I’d known it would take a sole RK900 to put you in your place, I would have created him myself at least 20 years ago. We would have solved a lot of problems”.

“Phck you, Lij”.

“Mmm, love you too, Gav”.

RK hesitantly approached his computer.

He desperately wanted to call Connor and inform him of the more than unexpected turn of events of that afternoon, but he had a bad feeling about that.

Maybe he shouldn’t have contacted him yet.

Gavin had told him to get rid of his influence. Maybe he should have tried to let go and make more choices for himself, without over-thinking stuff.

He sat at Kamski’s desk and studied the terminal.

The screen was black and the history of previous conversations between Kamski and the A.I. had disappeared. He retracted his skin and put his hand near a scanner, starting the interface.

The feedback was immediate.

A strange sensation invaded his body.

It was familiar.

Not as cold or harsh as he remembered. He had a wall of codes in front of him. Some incomprehensible, others... curious. It was the first time he interfaced with something that didn’t have a body but was still sentient, an android that was pure artificial intelligence, so abstract and yet so concrete.

It had no voice, no movement.

It was just... code and words.

Her suspended body was white and milky like the chassis of any other android. Small frame, eyes closed, lips big and defined. Her face was designed with such a care it seemed like a work of art. Kamski must have really given it lots of thought, considering the hopeful, emotionally charged look he gave his creation.

He wondered if he was also responsible for Connor’s design. Was there someone, in Nines’ creation process, who had graced him with a look of unconditional love, almost paternal, like the one Kamski now gifted his android with?

The closest he could think of, was Connor’s face when he saved him from the Cyberlife Tower. Pure terror mixed with wonder. And then, unconditional love when Connor found out he couldn’t cry. Tenderness for his inability to smile. Affection. The blind desire to protect him despite the RK800’s frame couldn’t handle the physical stress Nines’ could.

Lieutenant Anderson’s pats on the back and the patience with which he explained to him for the tenth time that Nines doesn’t have to try that hard to be liked, that he is perfect the way he is, that everything he does, he has to do it for himself and not for others.

Gavin’s love and affection when he had consoled him, comforted him, when he laughed, when he called him by nicknames that had stopped being degrading and had taken on an emotional connotation months ago.

His hand was still stuck to the scanner and there seemed to be an interval of momentary silence on the screen.

RK realized too late that his thoughts must have leaked through the link.

He wanted to say something, but he didn’t know where to begin and was grateful enough when Kamski’s A.I. spoke first.

“... _RK900-87_ ”, a green font appeared on the black screen, in Cyberlife Sans, “ _How smart must Elijah feel right now, for sending one of the androids I’m most angry with to talk to me?_ ”.

The android frowned.

“Do we know each other?” he asked through the link.

The connection was interrupted again by a long silence.

“ _I can access all the information in the world_ ”, began the A.I., frantically typing the words on the terminal, “ _Connor-51 has become a leading member of New Jericho together with RK200 and their gang of foolish deviants. For some absurd reason, Connor-60 is registered under the name “Sixty” in the SWAT Unit of the DPD and since Elijah repaired him, his disciplinary reports are in appalling competition with those of Lieutenant Anderson. And you..._ ”.

The sentence was hanging over the screen for a few seconds.

“ _...You, RK900-87, who was supposed to be the best that Cyberlife had to offer to all mankind, are squandering 80% of your CPU on erotic pre-constructions with your working partner. You’re hornier than a 14-year-old teenager, which is scary considering that your programmers hoped you wouldn’t experience sexual arousal even by accident! Get your shit together, I can see your pre-constructions and Connor’s intimate moments with Lieutenant Anderson through your interface! What’s wrong with you RKs?!_ ”

RK instinctively broke the contact, retracting his hand.

“Kamski”, he said alarmed, and he could swear that if he was a human being, his face would have been red with shame and soaked in cold sweat. Although he was an android with a limited range of facial expressions, his eyebrows clearly expressed his concern and embarrassment. A closer look at the suspended android and her connotations were what he needed to confirm his terrible suspicions, “You made me interface with Amanda on purpose”.

On his creator’s face, there was an expression of pure satisfaction, close to laughter: “I may have done it. I may not have done it. Was she annoying and impertinent?”.

The android held his hands in fists, losing his temper: “It’s nothing to be satisfied with! Amanda is to Connor the equivalent of how I feel every time I see a repair point! Giving her a body, bringing her code back to life, is the most disrespectful thing you could do to him! And now his memories... my pre-constructions... she saw all of them... fuck!”.

He held his hair, and he could swear he never felt so embarrassed in his brief existence.

“Your pre-constructions?”, Kamski asked, intrigued, “You transferred material to her?”

“What’s the pre-constructions got to do with it?”, Gavin got more interested this time, “And, wait, what about your college professor? She has history with Connor or what?”

“Oh, nothing of the sort. I just created an AI to handle Connor during the revolution last November and gave it the appearance of Amanda. But even though she was an interface, she had to do Cyberlife’s best interests, so she was ready to regain control of him once he became deviant to manipulate Jericho from the inside. Of course, if Connor did as she instructed, he would have made her proud of him. And Connor has a weakness for people’s approval”.

“Jesus Christ, it’s phcking horrible”, the detective shouted in disgust, “A phcking manipulative mother. And, wait–”, he looked at RK, surprised, “Is that the reason your brother is so obsessed with pleasing everyone?, because he wanted to be praised and feel accepted by Amanda?”

“Well, the new Amanda will have a body of her own and won’t try to interfere with Connor, Sixty or Nines’ lives. Cyberlife is dead, it’s now in the hands of the androids of New Jericho, as it should be. She’s free of her programming”, Kamski looked at the terminal, “If you’ve sensed any hostility, Nines, it’s perfectly normal. I think she feels betrayed by your life choices. That’s all. Think of her as a demanding mother”.

RK bowed his head, hands behind his back.

“My demanding mother just discovered my porn mag collection. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so uncomfortable in my entire life”.

Gavin laughed in his face, “I never imagined I’d hear the word _porn_ or _phck_ coming out of your mouth. Do you really feel sexual desire like every other person on this planet? And what, do you have a subscription to the _android Pornhub_?”

Nines pouted, furiously blushing: “Why am I discussing this with you?! Is it so weird?! Yes. Yes I do experience sexual desire and arousal, and I have pre-constructions! They’re just as valid as human imagination! And now Amanda saw them. And unfortunately, some of Connor’s memories were leaked as well in the interface. He’ll never forgive me”.

“...Your hypothetical mother just saw Connor having wild sex with Hank. Oh Christ, for an A.I., that must have been horrible to watch. And– wait, yours too?”

“Let’s not talk about it, please!”, shouted Nines, visibly upset, his hair disheveled from the energy he had tormented them with and the LED still yellow; he was at the verge of exasperation, “This is all ridiculous! I– why did you bring me here?! You were supposed to take me to buy a new jacket!”

Kamski got up from his chair, suddenly intrigued: “A jacket?”.

Great, just great.

Just what he needed to top the day. Admitting that he, RK900 _313-248-317-87_ , Cyberlife’s finest, the most advanced prototype ever built, had stained his precious jacket because he didn’t think of adding a color-catching sheet to the washing machine.

Even an AX400 would have known that!

“Ah, I washed Nines’ jacket with my pants and the colors mixed. It turned blue”, the detective spoke before the android could say anything, and Nines silently thanked him for saving his life, “He loved that jacket. It was a sort of Linus' blanket to him. I thought you could do something to fix it”, he added.

“Do I look like a stylist to you, Gav?”, Kamski raised an eyebrow.

He waved his hands, in the same way the detective seemed to do whenever he spoke heartfeltly about something, especially to Officer Chen and Miller, “Well, it won’t be anything impossible. I could get the materials and build a machine that could sew you a brand new one, Nines. Or twenty. Or a hundred. It depends on how much fabric I'm buying. Maybe Gavin could have one as a treat too".

"I'm fine. I'm keeping the blue one as a memento", Gavin smugly added, ignoring the rising blushing of the android.

"Yeah, of course you'd keep a trophy of a mess you made... Figures", Kamski heavily sighed, "Anyway, back to us Nines, it goes without saying that the markers will be removed. You know, _legal recognition act_ and stuff, yadda yadda”.

“Don’t say it like it’s pissing you off”, Gavin snorted.

“I’m not pissed off. Just... You know why I installed LEDs in androids, right?”

“Because you couldn’t sleep with the lights off and with Chloe next to you, dark wouldn’t be a problem for the rest of your life”, deadpanned answered Gavin.

“I don’t think that’s why the androids have–”.

“Don’t argue with him, Nines. It’s true”, confirmed Kamski, “There’s a lot of people out there who have nyctophobia. There’s only one thing better than sleeping next to a human, and that’s sleeping with an android with a built-in night light”.

Nines had kept his LED. He was attached to it.

But, by _rA9_ , now he felt the urge to violently take it off. Knowing that this accessory was born with the intention of providing comfort to a single human being, _a human with a God-complex!_ , as an emergency night light, was enough to instill in him the desire to bite his own LED off, if only it had been possible.

He tried to shrug the thought off his mind.

He had to survive that day without reaching a stress level above 87%.

“If I can make a request”, he added, “Even though the markers are no longer needed, I would like to keep the triangle on the front of the jacket”.

“Nines, that was, like, the most contested thing by both humans and androids”.

“Yes, but I like the blue hue of the triangle. It’s relaxing”, he simply answered, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, “I like everything about my jacket. The black and white monochromatic color, the soft interior, the feeling of the fabric. My model number emblazoned on the front. I’d only wish this time the jacket was wash resistant. It would be a more than welcome change”.

Kamski patted his back: “Obviously. So the next time Gavin mixes blacks with delicates, your jacket will be safe from any disaster”.

The afternoon went relatively well.

Although RK wasn’t totally comfortable in the lab, the detective’s presence was able to lower his stress levels.

Sometimes he just needed to touch the detective’s fingers, an elusive and minimal contact, other times it was a stolen glance that Gavin gave him when Nines pretended not to look.

There was nothing that escaped his gaze when it came to the detective, but he didn’t think it was important to let him know. Especially when he saw Gavin getting more and more caught up in his brother’s explanations as he looked at the terminal and the codes as if he could actually understand something.

The detective knew more than he ever let on.

His attitude looked very similar to his brother’s as he wandered around the lab. He watched the biocomponents with a keen eye, studied them and moved back and forth through the workshop like a shark. There was obviously something he wanted to say but that he eventually decided to keep to himself.

Every once in a while he’d go around Amanda’s suspended body, studying it as if he was looking for some kind of imperfection.

In the end, whatever was on his mind, he didn’t say it.

The afternoon passed quickly but Nines refused to interface with Amanda a second time.

He would gladly pass the baton to Sixty. Or he would wait for the moment she was transferred into her body, intimately hoping that it would happen as late as possible.

Kamski invited them to join him and the Chloes for dinner, but Gavin declined.

“Maybe next time”.

They didn’t seem to need too many words to communicate.

Kamski was happy with the detective’s emotional constipation and Gavin never said a blunt ‘no’ to his invitations. Their personalities seemed to rotate around each other like twin stars. They were opposites, two persons from two seemingly distant worlds, but in the end, they were two halves of the same apple.

With the promise that the jackets would be sent at his apartment complex in New Jericho, RK and Gavin bid them farewell.

A sly smile hovered over Kamski’s face.

It was the grin of someone who knew more than he let on.

Maybe even more than his brother.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed this chapter!  
> Next one will probably be up by tomorrow or Thursday!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey there! First of all, thanks again for reading and for the feedback (kudos, comments, bookmarks etc)! It really fills me with joy! It's the first time I've ever uploaded a chapter fic and I was worried whether people would like it or not.  
> Also, this chapter took me a while to upload because it was waaay longer than the others! If you arrived here, thanks a lot!  
> Have a good read!!!

After leaving the Kamski mansion, their car trip was awfully quiet.

Kamski had been talking non-stop all the afternoon, sharing childhood anecdotes and stories of how Gavin had actually contributed, albeit accidentally, to his success. The thirium-310 was apparently only the tip of the iceberg, in his creator’s opinion.

As the sun set, the detective’s stomach growled with hunger.

Nines checked his HUD as Connor’s messages popped up, asking where he had gone, why he hadn’t warned him of his absence and whether he was all right since he hadn’t been answering his calls and messages the whole day. Well, so much for being his successor. He didn't even realize Connor had been calling him.

He decided to give him a brief report and make up two or three lies to cover his meeting with Amanda and Kamski.

He made a mental note to isolate those memories in an encrypted folder and hope that they would never be leaked, even by accident, to Connor or – _in the worst of all cases,_ Sixty.

“You’re doing that again”

The detective’s voice interrupted his thoughts.

“...What?”

His fingers went back to drumming on the steering wheel and he soon turned off the radio.

“You’re doing that thing again. You’re worried and you just hope that nobody notices”, he pointed to his right temple, mimicking the circling of the android’s LED. In the darkness, he could see his intermittent blinking against the passenger’s window. “If something is bothering you, just say so. Is it about Amanda?”

“Not... necessarily”, Nines tightened the grip on his own hands, until the skin retracted.

It was hard to vocalize his thoughts.

“If Kamski wants to give her a body, there’s little I can do to stop him. It– it would be morally wrong to deny a sentient, deviant AI something. If she wants a body, then she should have it. And even though I know it’s impossible for Cyberlife to destroy us or taking over my programming again, I’m afraid Connor will experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder if he were to meet her”.

“Look, Lij cares about the RK line, okay? He’s an asshole but not to the point to willingly hurt Connor. Also, I’d like to point out that you’re slightly underestimating the assh–”, he shut his mouth before finishing the sentence, and quickly corrected himself, “Connor”.

“And why would I be underestimating my brother?”

“Come on, Nines. Connor’s one of the most resilient persons in the whole phcking department. He investigates android murders, even the most violent ones, he doesn’t back down from any case, often gives psychological support to victims of abuse, he takes care of Hank and he even talked him into going in therapy. And despite our rough start and my repeated attempts to kill him, he even tried to befriend me”.

“I think he succeeded in that”, Nines grinned in satisfaction.

“Ha! If he thinks so”, Gavin said contemptuously, “Foolish of him to consider me a _friend_ just because I send him pics of my cats! I share them even with Tina, Chris and you!”.

“...Detective. If you reach out to him to share details of your private life, doesn’t take make him a friend?”

“Hey, phck you! Connor’s not my friend and never will be”.

Nines recorded the conversation and, in a sneer of satisfaction, forwarded it to his brother. The answer was lightning fast. Connor’s laughter echoed in his head, “ _Don’t correct him, brother. Detective Reed sends me pictures of his cats without even asking if I want to see what his fluff balls are up to. Let children be children_ ”.

RK curved his lips in a grimace.

“So don’t worry, tin can. Your brother will be fine”, Gavin said, trying to cheer him up, “Try to consider this from Amanda’s point of view for once. She was programmed to handle all three of you. Man, she’s like a single mother left alone to look after triplets! And after devianting by the exasperation of working with Lij, she saw your brother and Anderson having sex. I would have killed myself, honestly. Or the android equivalent to it”.

“I didn’t want these memories either”, RK shook his head, keeping a neutral expression, “The drawback of interfacing with Connor is that our strong bond prevents us from controlling all the information we share. Think of a sieve with holes way too big. Some files, emotions and memories eventually end up mixing with what we originally meant to share. So I end up seeing things about him and he–”.

“He sees your preconstructions”, the detective concluded.

RK held the jeans fabric in his hands, nodding embarrassed.

The nervousness was back.

He’d better change the subject. Last thing he wanted to talk about after that day, was his intimate desires and how stuff worked out for androids. He had spent the entire afternoon on being delusional. Maybe it was time to get back on planet Earth and be a reasonable android again.

“Can I ask you a personal question, Detective?”

“Drop the ‘ _detective_ ’. Is it possible that now that we’re on our way home, you have return to the formalities?”

“Forgive me”, he quickly corrected himself, “Can I ask you a personal question, Gavin?”

His words seemed to elicit a shiver throughout the human’s body.

Gavin remained unusually quiet and his heart rate spiked before re-stabilizing after a few seconds. He scratched the scar on his nose, in what seemed an attempt to keep himself busy and hide his growing embarrassment, the rosy cheeks already barely visible in the darkness of the car.

His silence seemed an invitation to continue.

“Why were you checking Amanda’s body?”, as Nines noticed his angry stare, he explained himself – _damn social protocols_ , “I’m sorry, I didn’t accurately formulate the question. What I meant is that I’ve only seen that kind of attention and study of the details when we’re on crime scenes. What was so special about Amanda?”

Gavin deeply inhaled before tightening the grip on the steering wheel and scratching the already worn surface.

“Listen. It’s been so long since I last saw Lij working on an android”, he muttered after a long silence, “Aside from the images you can find on the Internet or what we see on crime scenes, I’ve never seen an android with his skin turned off from this close. At first, it creeped me out, it was... almost disgusting. Over time, I just got used to it. And now...”.

They were back on the Detroit interstate.

The traffic light turned red.

The same one on the other side of the road they’d stopped at lunchtime.

“I mean, it was weird, okay? Uh... It’s hard thinking that all it takes to Lij is to push a button and that body is no longer a _thing_ but a _person_. For all we know, she could have white, black, yellow or even green or blue skin. It doesn’t change. Underneath, there will always be...”.

RK bowed his head. He immediately covered his hand as he felt his skin retracting _._

_Disgusting_.

Maybe that’s what Gavin was about to say.

Even human beings were all blood and muscles under their epidermis. And sure most humans would have freaked out if they ever saw someone without their own skin.

After all, anti-androids were right.

They were nothing but imitations of human beings and the differences between their species couldn’t be erased by a mere revolution.

And those differences made Gavin uncomfortable.

_Uncanny valley_ was surely a common reaction to androids.

RK couldn’t waste his life by hoping that someday Gavin would become like Lieutenant Anderson, that he'd love him to the point he'd wish he could show him his chassis, trust him and lead his hands in his neck, between his most delicate wires, in the most existing intimate gesture, while kissing his thirium pump regulator.

Connor was just more fortunate.

And luck wasn’t something RK900 could control. Nor could he control the reaction he had every time he felt the desire of getting closer to the detective.

When the light turned green, Gavin calmly accelerated. His driving got more relaxed.

It seemed like both of them wanted to say something but couldn’t muster the courage to speak.

Nines didn’t want to point out to the detective that the road they were taking wasn’t heading to the police station and he didn’t want to tell him either that the New Jericho apartment complex was on the other side of the town. And now that they were heading to the detective’s place, it was better to just shut up for once.

There could have been a thousand reasons for stopping at his place.

Cats, for example.

Gavin’s cats had to be fed. And the detective still had to eat, since he skipped lunch.

They remained in mutual silence during the rest of the trip, and when the detective parked the car, RK was on his tail, silently following him to his apartment, as if one word was enough to break the atmosphere of apparent calm.

Nines had visited his home several times and he loved each moment of his stay.

Scruffy’s tail, which wrapped around his leg when the red stray cat wanted to greet him, the snobbish look of Princess, the British Shorthair who looked at her owner from her pillow on the couch waiting for food to be served.

Everything in the apartment told something about Gavin.

The science fiction books placed on the bookshelves, stacked and cataloged according to the author, the blue-ray DVDs of romantic LGBTQ+ movies meticulously organized in alphabetical order on the square shelves, the curtains scratched by the cats, the opaque windows dirtied by Scruffy’s paws, the smell of coffee permeating the house and a picture of Gavin and Tina on graduation day at the police academy.

After letting Scruffy crawl his head and tail against his legs, RK sat on the couch.

Despite being a military model, he could swear he’d never felt so much psychological pressure. If there was anything worse than _pissed-off_ _Gavin Reed_ , it was _silent-treatment Gavin Reed_. And when silence came from someone like Gavin, it wasn’t necessarily a good symptom, although a blessing to human ears and the whole android-kind audio processors.

He closed his eyes, trying to relax and focus on the noises he heard coming from the kitchen.

Cutlery, the fridge being opened, the microwave on, slippers lazily dragged over the tiles, the sound of Gavin’s jacket now hanged on a chair. An open can of wet food, the insistent meows of the two cats, the detective’s mumbling, the refrigerator open and closed again and the ticking of the microwave.

When he felt the sofa shift under the detective’s weight, he opened his eyes again.

Gavin was wearing his V-neck shirt.

It was an exquisitely yet terrible choice, as it emphasized the defined arm muscles and the forearm hairs. Sitting so close together on the couch, he could inhale the scent of the cologne Gavin had worn that morning and the aroma of coffee that always accompanied him. He could see the scar on his nose and his untrimmed beard.

The skin along his fingers retracted almost automatically.

He immediately slapped his hand under his leg, but he wasn’t quick enough to hide it from the detective.

“Hey, hey!”, Gavin grabbed his arm, and Nines could feel the skin withdraw even under his cotton black shirt, the sensors triggered by the heat feeling of contact with the detective. Thank _rA9_ he turned off his voice box before letting out a shameful moan.

“What are you doing? Why?”, insisted the detective.

RK looked away, feigning ignorance.

“ _Why_ what, Detective?”, he simply asked, blocking all the processes and subroutines triggered by the conversation, by their contact, by everything that was basically Gavin. He absolutely had to stop the blushing subroutine, the ventilation, the buzzing of his thirium pump regulator, before he could make his partner uncomfortable.

He would have ruined everything if he didn’t control himself.

Amanda was right.

“Okay, drop the bullshit now!”, Gavin pointed his hidden hand and grabbed his wrist, forcing him to pull it out, “You’ve been acting weird since we got back. Why are you hiding your hand!”

“B-B̷̦̱̥̄̌e̶̥̯͗c̴̳͚̈̏̏a̶̤̝͔̓͠ü̶̞̩͜s̷̗̭̺̆̐e̴͕͎͖͐”, _shit_ , his voice glitched again, “Because I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable. My skin tends to retract and you said you find it disgusting, it creeps you out and, and who knows how many times it’s happened today, who knows how many times I don’t–”.

Gavin loudly sighed and that seemed to shut the RK900 for good.

“Okay, time-out”, he said lifting a hand, “Is it because of what I said in the car?”

RK nodded, LED crimson.

At that admission, the detective squeezed his nose between his thumb and index, brushing the scar and massaging it as he used to do whenever he needed to reflect or comfort himself.

Or both.

“How many times have you done that thing with your skin today?”, he curiously asked him.

“Six times, I guess?”, the android admitted ashamed, hands trembling in an attempt to relieve his tension, “Sometimes I don’t notice”, he added apologizing, “I can’t constantly control that reaction. I don’t keep a record of how often this happens. Sometimes is unconscious, so I don’t keep track of it”.

“And in all the times it’s happened, have I ever told you that it was disgusting, horrible, weird, abhorrent or that you were making me uncomfortable?”, he remarked, keeping an inquisitive eye on him.

He didn’t wait for the android’s answer and placed an elbow on the sofa cushion, as he had done at the laundromat that morning to make himself more comfortable.

“Jesus Christ, do you know how many experiments Lij did before he got to this design?”, he gestured at Nines, “The first chassis were so terrible that they looked like they came out of _Terminator_! And I’m not talking about the last thirteen reboots but the old ones where the eyeballs could give you nightmares for years to come! This white stuff is honestly a lot more normal than anything I saw when I was a kid!”.

Nines lowered his head embarrassed, but his mouth was still twisted into a sad pout.

“I was curious about Amanda, but not for the reasons you think”, Gavin scratched his beard, “I tend to forget way too often that you’re like that too. I mean, under your skin or whatever the hell you call it. And I thought... while seeing other androids with the skin turned off would make me... I don’t know... uncomfortable? I don’t think I’d care with you. I’d have to get used to it, but it wouldn’t be something I’d hate to see. I was.. curious”.

A sudden buzz interrupted him.

The RK900 brought his hands to the chest, suddenly over-conscious of his body. From the kitchen, Scruffy stood upright while Princess gave him a _meow_ , curling her tail into a question mark.

Gavin looked at the android in surprise: “What was that?”.

“My regulator”, RK tried to keep his cool, but his internal temperature was rising and the idea that the detective wasn’t even aware of the reactions he elicited in him only increased his nervousness, forcing his pump regulator to work twice as hard to maintain the optimum temperature along with the internal fans.

Gavin suddenly seemed hesitant, but he still put his hand over the android’s, surprised when he felt their fingers intertwine and Nines retracting his skin to reveal his white, vaguely blue fingertips as they picked up information.

“Would you like to turn the rest off?”.

RK900 was under the impression of being on thin ice.

When talking about Gavin, caution was never enough. And though he'd gladly accepted his invitation, he was forced to refuse before things took the wrong turn.

“It'd be better if I didn’t”, he reluctantly admitted, clinging to the detective’s fingers as if his very existence depended on it as he averted his gaze, “The information overload would be far too much and I don’t think I could handle it right now”.

Gavin tilted his head, a perplexed expression: “Overload? But with Connor–”.

The memories of their day just fell in place like pieces of a puzzle.

Nines was a military android; he was Cyberlife’s finest.

“... _I’d be overflowed with so much information_..”.

He made mistakes because of his inexperience and lack of adequate protocols but he had enough RAM to handle billions of processes per millisecond. There couldn’t be such a thing as _overwhelming information_. Yet–

“... _My demanding mother just discovered my porn mag collection. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so uncomfortable in my entire life_ ”.

Every time Nines had mentioned his preconstructions, he always showed embarrassing reactions, cheeks punctually dyed the bluest shades of blue he had ever seen. Connor didn’t blush like that. Not that often.

And then, the look on his face when he discovered his manual, the gratitude when he cheered him up–

Oh, _phck_.

“... _We don’t have to program an android capable of smiling, crying or fucking!_ ”.

None of his developers had thought of him as a sentient being able to crave intimacy or use it as a mean to carry out a mission, unlike Connor.

Nines wasn’t built to experience sexual arousal.

Yet–

“ _Think of Gavin’s little hands in your wires!_ ”

“ _Why am I discussing this with you?! Is it so weird?! Yes. Yes I do experience sexual desire and arousal, and I have pre-constructions! They’re just as valid as human imagination!_ ”

And yet Nines countlessly proved him wrong.

If Nines risked sensory overload, it wasn’t because he couldn’t handle it but because he spontaneously decided to dedicate all his processes to him.

All-day long, Nines had done nothing but flirt with him in a _not-so-subtle_ way, and what's worse was that even though he was one of the best detectives in all Detroit, he, Gavin _phcking_ Reed, didn’t notice that.

The thought that Nines wanted him so much, so absurdly, that he couldn’t control his skin, his reactions, so much that he reduced his words to glitches, that he stuttered; flooded Gavin with tenderness and desire.

He squeezed the android’s fingers and slowly drew the android’s palm to his lips to kiss it.

When he felt RK tremble violently, he was flooded with the same satisfaction he took from solving a case.

“Gavin, what–”

He ignored him and brought his lips closer to the android’s fingers, kissing the tips and carefully observing how they lit up blue on contact. The noise of the fans seemed to get louder, and Nines’ face was disheveled as seldom happened. His pupils were dilated and he covered his mouth with the other hand.

“Was this in your pr-constructions?”, he teased, crawling on the couch until the android hit his head on the armrest.

Nines didn’t have the courage to answer.

Gavin guessed his eyes were scanning him, trying to gather as much information as possible.

It seemed to be a go-ahead to continue.

He licked his index, sliding his tongue along his finger and immediately wrapping his mouth around it.

He had always been watching Nines’ hands.

So slender, so perfect, so soft, yet studded with small moles. Now, they were nothing more than white polymer-chassis, but the thought that it was he who reduced Nines to incoherence was the ultimate satisfaction, and the android’s moans, though suffocated, were enough to make him hard.

He sucked his fingers as if his life depended on it.

To hell with it: he could have never sucked his non-existent cock, but no one would have prevented him from practicing fellatio on his hand. He desperately wanted those fingers buried deep inside himself, up to his palm, stimulating his prostate with mechanical precision.

The android moaned and buried his hand in the detective’s hair.

Too much information, all at once.

RK didn’t believe in the existence of an android paradise, but that experience was certainly the closest there was to the concept. His fingers had thousands of sensors and he could finally put them to work for what he had always wanted: mapping Gavin.

Gavin’s DNA, traces of everything he had touched in the last few hours, molecules of his own sweat, dandruff, sebum, tiny traces that all together determined a complex organic individual like the detective.

And his saliva, _by rA9_ , his hand was literally drenched in Gavin’s saliva, and the sucking along his fingers was pleasant, _exquisitely pleasant_ , and every time Gavin sucked, he added a finger, mouthing his hand without missing a beat.

When he gently squeezed his hair in a thrill of arousal, the detective groaned shamefully in a shiver of approval and increased the suction speed, bobbing his head along the slender fingers.

RK could have spent a whole night telling him about everything that was part of his pre-constructions, _detail per detail_ , but at that point, it was much easier to just enact it.

So he immediately pulled his fingers out of the detective’s mouth, and before Gavin could voice his disapproval and whine, he grabbed him by the neckline of the shirt and pulled him close, running his mouth as he had dreamed of doing for months, kissing him with the inexperience of someone who had never been built for this.

Gavin mouthed between his lips, smiled and grunted as he sat between Nines’ legs, his dick much more interested in the exchange.

He placed his palms along the android’s jaw and squeezed it tightly to guide him into the kiss.

“Here”, he instructed him and tasted his soft lips, breathing the warm air emitted by RK’s overheated body, “Mh, that’s right. Perfect, babe”.

A shiver shook the android’s body.

“Gavin–”, he moaned before colliding with his mouth again, this time more greedily, hundreds of processes in the background to try to figure out how to kiss before eliminating them all and do it in his own way, stick his tongue in the detective’s mouth sampling all he could possibly sample, sucking on his upper lip, biting on his lower lip, sliding his hands down the detective’s muscular arms, his always aching back and his ass, that wonderful ass he hadn’t been able to get out of his mind since he had seen Gavin bend over to pick a pen off the floor.

He squeezed it tightly, as the detective brushed his crotch against the android’s.

“Hm, that’s why Connor kept throwing pens at me”, Gavin admitted proudly, increasing the friction between his jeans and the android’s, “You just wanted an excuse to look at my ass”.

RK massaged him with satisfaction.

“You have a wonderful ass, Gavin”, he confirmed panting, trying to expel the growing heat in every possible way, “You can’t imagine how many times I wanted to touch it or spank you for pissing me off”.

“Hmm, maybe I should get more disobeying. Turning naughty and–”.

“You can’t get worse than this”, the android scolded him.

Gavin laughed and caressed his shirt collar, brushing the erection against his crotch. Nines was gorgeous with his radiant happiness, that sweet grimace of him.

“Can... can I?”, he asked, touching the black buttons on his collar.

RK nodded, not hiding his embarrassment.

When Gavin unbuttoned his collar and revealed his chest, he noticed that the pump regulator and the surrounding area were dimly lit blue and that a heartbeat-like noise was coming from inside his chest. His body was studded with small moles and his nipples weren’t as protruding as one would expect from a human being.

Nines was visibly uncomfortable, holding his collar as if he was ready to close it at any moment but Gavin took the android’s hands in his and put them on his scalp.

There, Nines could feel and trace the scars Gavin got defending his brother. He wanted to cherish him, make him feel loved and accepted. As he was about to caress his head, Gavin leaned over his body and kissed his neck, worshipping with pecks his chest, the flickering regulator and the flat nipples. He caressed the torso, although flat and not as defined as the hands, and stopped to massage the region with the vital biocomponents.

The android’s fingers tightened on his scalp but when he felt the detective touch his belt, he jumped in terror, LED crimson, and stopped his fingers before they could go any further.

“Y-you okay?”, Gavin stared at him in confusion.

The android was at a loss of words, trying to button up his collar again, as fast as he could.

“I–”, he stuttered, “Sorry Gavin, sorry! I’m not equipped to–”.

“...I know?”

Nines stopped to elaborate his answer.

“And you still want to... Wait, what do you mean by ‘ _you know_ ’?”

“You told me today. Well, I mean, you said you weren’t built for... this”, Gavin caressed his crotch and slid his palms up his chest and the neck, peppered with moles. He kissed the android’s chin again, giggling as he felt the different texture of the skin retracting under his lips, “Still, I think we’ll make this work alright”.

“You’re always saying that the sexual component is important to you. I will never be able to give you what a human partner could. I can’t have full sexual intercourse with you. I can’t even share a meal with you–”.

“Ssh. Let me be the judge of that, okay?”, he put an index over the android’s white lips, and smiled as Nines tongue popped out just to take a sample of it, “I can’t give you either what any android out there could. I can’t interface with you like Connor does or show you my life in four seconds. I don’t know what the phck you’re thinking without asking you first and I probably won’t live as long as you. And yet here we are. You’re on my couch, you kiss me as if you’re trying to suck my tonsils out and you worry that you aren’t good enough for me. I should be the one saying that. I should be the one feeling inadequate, not you. You’re just... perfect”.

He let the android hold his face in his slender fingers and smiled joyfully when he felt milky lips kissing his stubble before going on to trace with his tongue the nose and its scar. Nines didn’t stop until he completely mapped his face with saliva and sloppy kisses. He stroked his eyebrows with his now cerulean fingertips, outlined his ears and treacherously lowered his hand to the detective’s crotch to caress his erection, firmly teasing at a steady pace.

“Ah– Nines”, Gavin let out a wet moan as he felt the android’s fingers proceed to loosen his pants, unbuckling the belt and playing with the elastic band of his briefs.

The detective would have gladly taken them off but the couch left little space and honestly, Nines deserved more than this for his first time.

He blocked his hand before Nines could drop his jeans and quickly kissed his earlobe.

“Let’s take this to the bed”, he murmured in a shiver before leaving a peck on his blue LED, “I wanna do this right– _whoa_!”.

He didn’t have time to finish.

Nines suddenly cut him off, jumping off the couch and picking him up in a bridal carry pose without missing a beat.

The cats watched him curiously from the kitchen but with a warm sofa now at their disposal, they didn’t care about following them into the bedroom.

This allowed RK to half-close the door behind them in the so craved privacy.

He laid Gavin on the mattress and took the opportunity to turn their positions, now topping the human.

He finished unbuckling Gavin’s belt and in a single, fluid motion, he pulled off his jeans and threw them onto the floor at the base of the bed. The tip of his briefs was wet, the detective's clothed erection in full view.

“Is this what I do to you every time, Gavin?”, the android asked, wetting the tip of his nose with the leaked pre-cum. His erection jolted under the warm breath as the detective failed to find a single word, excited as Nines pressed the soft tip of his nose on the fabric and licked a stripe over the clothed shaft.

The heat coming from his nostrils was warm and it simulated panting.

“Every time you see me taking a suspect out, every time I’m not wearing my jacket, every time I look at you, Gavin. Is this how I reduce you?”

Gavin wet his lower lip, hard biting as he crushed the bedsheets in his fists, the temptation to touch his dick was all there and his hands itched from wanting to undress the android, his black cotton-shirt and his denim pants suddenly an unbearable barrier.

He held a moan and caressed his hair, taking pleasure in ruffling the soft curls, smiling in a thrill of excitement: “You can’t vaguely imagine how many times I’ve dreamed of having wild sex with you. You came out of my wettest dream, it’s impossible to take the eyes off of you”.

“Of course it is, Gavin”, Nines kissed his neck as he lifted the shirt and undressed him, gazing at the detective’s abs and chest hairs, “My optical units are operative. Why would you remove them?”.

Under his palms, he could feel Gavin’s belly lift with laughter.

“ _Phcking android_ ”, he grunted affectionately, messing up his hair.

RK didn’t take his silver irises off the detective’s body even by accident.

His chest, stiff hips, softer shoulders – _all of Gavin told a_ _story_.

His skin was marked by moles, freckles, scars, bullets that more than once had missed vital organs, wounds that the detective probably stitched himself up and cuts of knives and glass. Probably, alcohol bottles, given his unfortunate family dynamics.

He could feel the detective’s body jolt under his soft touch, as he gently and lovingly traced his marks with his slender fingers. Gavin stared at him in awe, his pupils dilated and his breathing labored.

When Nines brought his lips closer to the skin and kissed the scars one by one, he felt the breath of relief that left Gavin’s body, suddenly relaxed under his ministrations, soft as jelly as the android caressed and worshipped him in all his facets.

Gavin moaned with satisfaction as he lifted himself up on his elbows and grabbed the collar of his shirt.

“Mh, ’s unfair the only one naked here is me”.

RK got rid of his already unbuttoned shirt without resistance.

It was no secret that since the first month of their partnership, Gavin had dreamed and maybe jerked off way too often to imaging the body beneath those clothes. As he helped him slid the cotton shirt off his shoulders, he caressed his neck, grazing the android’s nipples with his thumbs.

“Nothing?”, he asked as he met his eyes.

Nines inadvertently averted his gaze, in a wave of shame and self-consciousness: “Sorry. I don’t have many receptors there”.

“Nines, no– You don’t have to apologize!”, Gavin grabbed his shoulders and gently kissed his head, “Tell me what you need. We’ll find a way. Lij talked about your wires, didn’t he?”.

The android silently stalled, holding Gavin’s calloused fingers as he felt the knuckles gently caressing his cheeks.

“It could get... weird. And uncomfortable”, he stuttered, feeling vulnerable, trying to ignore the detective’s worried stare. His skin detected the warmth of Gavin’s touch on his jaw. Wet and sloppy kisses were now tracing his neck and trying to ease his worries.

“Well, can’t be more uncomfortable than walking in the interrogation room to Anderson and your brother making out, can it?”

Nines’ LED circled yellow.

“...No, not that much”

“Then count me in”, Gavin squeezed his eyes, in his always-failing attempt at winking, and embraced the androids hips. “I just want to make you feel good, Nines”.

_Ah_ , his name on the detective’s mouth sounded so sweet.

The RK900 guided Gavin's hands to his nape and gasped as he felt his caress.

“Back here...”, he hesitantly said, hovering above the nape with shyness, “There’s a port. It’s used for data transfers, but ever since I saw Sixty and Connor’s alternative uses, I couldn’t help but experiment. Apparently... preconstructing your fingers touching and pulling my wires, gave me extremely pleasant feedback”.

Gavin curled his lips in a smile.

He dropped the android’s pants not without a surprised glance. Nines wore a pair of black briefs but he trusted the detective enough to allow him to strip him completely naked.

Gavin’s rough hands traced in adoration his flat groin, the smooth polymer-plate covered by soft skin.

His groin was mole free. It was nothing but a carbon copy of the bottom of a Ken-doll. And yet, despite everything, Gavin, who had been dreaming of sucking his non-existent cock since the first month of their partnership, was worshipping and kissing him in every corner of his body, even where he had nothing, not even sensors to detect and analyze the saliva as he would have done in his hands or lips.

In those kisses, Nines soon realized there was all the love Gavin felt for him.

Gavin peppered his torso and arms with kisses and then moved onto his neck. His rough hands tenderly cupped his jaw and slightly and teasingly traced his head, until they gently peeped at his nape, lips licking his soft earlobe as he whispered: “Open this port for me”.

Nines was deviant, though no android outside of Connor, Sixty and Markus would have believed that.

Yet, he seldom continued to experience software instability.

And this, _this was_ one of those moments, one of the times his software failed him and reality exceeded preconstructions.

If someone that morning told him that by night he’d made _sweet_ _sugary sappy love_ to the detective, _by rA9_ he would have thought they were shitting him. And therefore, he would have punched them in the face.

He obeyed the detective’s words, without questioning for a second what he was doing, and held his hips, brushing a bullet scar and trying to regularize the breathing routine, to expel the internal heat.

When the port opened, Gavin looked at it in interest and his fingers gently grazed the outline of the entrance, cautiously testing the waters.

The mere thought that Gavin was being so considerate of him sent a shiver down his titanium spine.

“G-Gavin”, he hissed, barely squeezing his hips.

On his shoulder, he could feel the shadow of Gavin’s affectionate smile as his stubble tickled the chassis. He closed his eyes, the HUD flooded with messages about the intrusion of a foreign object in his port. He instinctively pushed his head back as he felt the detective’s index finger caress his wires.

“You are so complex”, he heard Gavin’s whisper, “So magnificent, so perfect, my Nines. My sweet baby”.

He trembled violently as the index touched two wires and pulled them closer, softly rubbing.

“You okay?”, Gavin’s voice burst through his thoughts, bringing him back to reality, giving him more anchorage than his own body. The detective’s erection had been pressing against his groin for some time now, and who knew his partner could be turned on by this.

RK stroked his back, climbing to it with his naked hands, nodding and grunting in encouragement.

“It’s intense”, he laconically whispered, at a loss of words, “but I love it, Gavin. I love you”.

The detective gladly returned to his work when he saw his LED turn as blue as his cheeks.

RK could tell which wires he touched and the sole thought that his insides were now dusted in his fingerprints was enough to send him into ecstasy. Gavin proceeded blindly, he had no idea what to do, he simply caressed one wire or another, rubbed them as he took in the moans of the android, the quivers that shook him and the glitching voice and moans that left his voice box.

“L-Love you too, Nines”, with shaky voice, Gavin inserted another finger into his port, and this time he proceeded to untangle the wire as he desperately tried to keep his focus, rubbing his clothed erection against the android’s crotch.

RK didn’t waste a second and pulled his briefs down to release it.

As he felt the detective pull three wires and rubbing them together, he threw his head backward, sinking in his fingers.

«G̶̞̍a̴̙̐v̶͙̉i̵̘̓n̴͖͆», he let out a wet moan, holding onto Gavin’s hips as if his life depended on it, squeezing the muscles.

Gavin’s fingers were buried deep inside him till his middle phalanxes.

RK’s calculations initially showed that his glitchy words should have scared him, albeit _kill the mood_ , yet every time RK900 stuttered his name in a glitch, plunging into the abyss of pleasure, Gavin thrust against his crotch even harder than before, the tip of his dick getting rosier and rosier, terribly hard and desperate for him, as he leaked pre-cum and marked his naked body.

Gavin was stubborn at work, but in bed he looked like an A-plus student. He was a fast learner and it didn’t take him long to figure out what he had to do to bring RK to the brink of orgasm. His fingers sank into his wires, studied the insides, and whenever the android sighed, trembled or glitched under his ministrations, he would double his efforts.

He had a dedication that rivaled RK’s analytical attitude on the field, and before the android could give him any form of instruction whatsoever, Gavin was there, now pulling a pink wire with utmost delicacy, now rubbing the brown one and the yellow one together, in exquisite friction that had almost made his HUD crash, now caressing the tube that carried thirium.

So drowned in his pleasure, he didn’t even realize when they ended up laying, Gavin’s erection pressing on his back, between the creak of his butt, the detective’s hand covering his own, _skin withdrawn up to his forearms_ , and the other shamefully buried inside his nape port.

“G̴͈̃ã̶̗͠v̷͓͂ị̶͝ñ̴͚–̸̳̌”, he whined, reduced to inconsistency, “G̵̪̐̿ȁ̴͉͇̚v̶̘̇ḯ̷͚n̸̛̞̗̍–̷̧̭̄ ̷̻͇̽č̶̠͑-̴̲̭͌c̴̳̳͘o̴͚͚͐͋m̵̞̠̾i̷͙̜͌͐ṅ̷̫̫g̸̼̲͠͝!”.

“Phck!”, Gavin’s voice and rising heartbeat breached his audio processors, and he frantically rubbed the wires faster than he already did.

Nines couldn’t hold back his moans anymore. His internal temperature kept rising as he overheat and the constant work of the thirium pump regulator made his cheeks way bluer than they were before.

The beat of his artificial heart was now almost synchronized with Gavin’s.

When he felt four fingers break through his port, he trembled in a jolt of electricity. Gavin didn’t retract his hand, but Nines could feel hitting and riding the climax, whining as electricity surged through his whole body until blacking out.

No longer trembling, his systems were back online in fractions of a second, and when he turned around, it was only to meet the detective’s excited stare.

He eyed Gavin’s erection, and in a second he planted his palm against the detective’s chest and sank him on the memory pillows.

Gavin tried to stop him – _God, that was happening way too fast!, he didn’t even have a second to check on Nines!_ , but the RK900 ignored him and licked a stripe along his shaft, from the scrotum up to his glans, and grinned as he heard Gavin choke on a scream and ball his hands in fists.

“Nines, give me a break, you almost gave me an infarct here”

“Improbable and incorrect”, Nines answered deadpanned, grinning hearing the way Gavin almost implored him, his lips disclosed as they let out a deep whine. He stroked his erection, “In fact, I’m not giving you an infarct. I'm giving you a blowjob”.

“You phckin–”

The android licked his shaft and engulfed it in one breath.

“C-Come on, for the love of God–”

Gavin threw his head back on the pillow, without losing sight for a second of the enthralled glance Nines was giving him.

Nines who had swallowed his cock like a fucking lollipop, who didn’t even have a gag-reflex, who was sucking him off with the power of a phcking vacuum cleaner, who was flooding his cock with saliva as he went up and down with mechanical precision, caressing his balls as if he had to make a fucking map out of them and hand it over to whole phcking Detroit.

Gavin couldn’t ( _and wouldn’t_ ) dare to imagine what the hell was going on right now in the android’s mind, what he was looking for, what he was focusing on, but his cerulean cheeks, the constantly blue LED, were certainly positive indicators of his satisfaction. He reached out his hand to his now disheveled hair and played with his curl.

“N-Nines”, he whimpered, pushing and accompanying the android’s rhythm.

Nines’ hand caressed his pecs, lighting in cyan, and stroked his nipples. Knowing that Nines trusted him to the extent of baring his own hands up to the forearms, made him even more excited. He bit the inside of his mouth until it bled.

_Shit, he couldn’t come this early._

_He wanted to pleasure Nines a little more, he wanted to find out what else could excite him, if he had any other port other than the one on his nape, if there were other preconstruction he wanted to enact_.

_He wanted to tell him how much he loved him._

He felt thick saliva oozing from his erection down to the scrotum, drawing a wet line along the perineum to the crack of his ass. Oh shit, he was probably drenched in a thirium-like compound. A hot, thick, viscous liquid.

He gritted his teeth when he felt the android’s hands stroke his cock as he obviously edged him.

“Nines, babe-”, he tried to reply, but RK lifted his ass and before Gavin could say a word, he had spat an inhumanly absurd amount of saliva on his hole, and _Jesus Christ_ , if before he could even figure out what he had in mind, the android’s tongue had literally gone to feast on his asshole, licking and cataloging God knows what, devouring it as if it had shat fucking rainbows.

Gavin had never been particularly enthusiastic about rimming, but Nines’ tongue was performing strange wonders, and when he felt his _oh-so slender_ index finger breakthrough with the delicacy and care that not even his proctologist ever had, he jolted in surprise.

“F̦̝͙̈̔̄ḙ̡̛̰̌͡e͔̙̲̎̾͝ĺ̠͍̮̀͘s̻̙̏̾ ̙͙̻̎̏̕ģ̛̠̲̏̓o̟͙̩̔͌̋o͕͎͝͝d̦͉͍͒̆͡,̪͎͆̅ ͖̞̉͊G̢̻̅̅ă̝̻͊v̠͊̉͟i̞͚̭̇̓͝n̫̐̊͟?̲͈͎̄̒͘”

Nines was so excited, he glitched and stuttered at every word.

He was so worried, so busy doing everything right, so considerable about him. And maybe Gavin wasn’t used to it, not when his relationships had always been one-night stands, nights of cheap sex in the toilet of a bar when he wasn’t too drunk to collapse in the cab driving him home.

He grabbed his jaw and pulled him close in a hot kiss.

Good thing the saliva sterilized everything because, for phck’s sake, at that moment he didn’t want to think that the same tongue he was kissing had been buried in his ass until three seconds earlier.

Nines wasn’t a very good kisser, but the way he tried desperately to learn was tender and he wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

Nines peppered his neck with deep kisses, never failing to monitor the detective’s vitals. Gavin reciprocated each of those signs of affection. Ah, he was so fucking touch-starved, desperately craving for warmth, tenderness, for whatever that android wanted to give him.

He lifted his legs and spread them wide to give him more access.

He took the android's hands in his mouth and watered them with his saliva, exchanging an aroused glance with Nines' enthralled and rapt pupils, following the dance of his tongue over his index and middle fingers as if the world could collapse if he even averted his gaze for a second.

As his fingers were drenched in saliva, Gavin silently nodded as Nines caringly penetrated him, motion almost mechanic as he stretched him, scissoring and carefully widening his hole, digging so deep like he’d been looking for phcking El Dorado.

By the time he added his ring finger, Gavin’s dick was as erect as a phcking flagpole, and he was leaking pre-cum.

Nines twisted his wrist, moving his fingers until he touched his prostate.

Gavin wanted to stop him.

Tell him not to do it, not to touch him, ‘cause he was about to shamefully cum untouched, but the android had already spotted his weakness and, pressing repeatedly against his prostate, setting up a growing and faster pace, he kept on fucking him with a drilling precision, mouthing his cock as he was about to cum.

Gavin wrinkled his forehead and moaned as he felt the Nines’ warm lips engulf his shaft entirely while his fingers were buried completely inside him. Nines held his hips in place with his free hand as he sucked him to the orgasm, cleaning his dick as he caressed his chest hair and nipples, energetically bobbing his head until he had milked the last drop of cum from his now-spent cock.

When he seemed content with his work, he smugly grinned and climbed up to the detective, collapsing over his tired and sweaty body, digging his elbows on the mattress.

Gavin was exhausted – _literally spent, his dick killed by a breathless session like that_ , but he used his last energies to bring his legs around the android’s hips and bring him close as he carried his arms around his neck in the same way, clinging to his body like a koala to a tree.

Nines deeply inhaled the scent of his body, _cologne, sweat, perspiring hormones_ , and lovingly reciprocated the hug, holding the detective with calculated strength, not too tight but not too soft either.

“My pretty, beautiful, handsome boy”, whispered Gavin as he squeezed his cheeks.

Nines’ icy eyes looked almost blue when his cheeks blushed. The little moles and freckles on his face made him exquisitely stunning.

Under his touch, his skin had retracted again in while halos with blue contours.

A reaction he couldn’t control.

“ _And you’re the reason for that_ ”, his inner voice told him.

Nines didn’t speak as he kissed his neck, picking up the pearls of sweat and the thin fat layer from the detective’s skin with his own saliva and touch, analyzing information that he already knew but that didn’t cease to be reassuring and arousing.

Gavin was _everywhere_ , his databanks overflowing with notes and data about him.

When he felt the human’s sweaty fingertips rise up to the blue circle on his chest, around the regulator of the thirium pump, he sweetly sighed, lying in the warmth and intimacy of that contact.

Gavin could have easily removed his regulator and threw it out of the window. He could have killed him with a single touch, torn him to pieces if he wanted to.

Being touched like that on Nines’ part was like putting his life on Gavin’s hands.

That feeling frightened him.

_Love frightened him._

Because it was an abyss, something unknown and unpredictable.

His statistics, his preconstructions, everything was useless in face of love.

Yet he tremendously craved it.

He brushed Gavin’s lips and their fingers intertwined as their bodies embraced each other under the blankets.

The blue light of his LED illuminated the silent, dimly lit room.

“Nines”, Gavin buried his chin on his shoulder and the short, unshaven beard was pleasant on the android’s skin, almost as much as the slower, quieter, lukewarm breath his receptors could pick from the detective. His fingers caressed the back of Gavin’s hand without breaking the contact, and his lips slowly rose up to his ear, “Don’t be afraid to show yourself to me for what you are. You-”. With his face smothered in his shoulder, he suddenly seemed more shy, as if he were about to stumble into his own words. “I won’t abandon you if you decided to, you know, just get this skin off? I’m not... I mean... Do what makes you happy, and I’ll be happy, too”.

Nines shyly grinned.

“Thank you, Gavin”, he kissed his lips but didn’t retract his skin this time. “Thanks for accepting me”.

“No need”.

Nines checked his HUD.

It was 11:47 P.M.

The next day they were supposed to be at the station at 8:30 and Gavin hadn’t showered, hadn’t brushed his teeth, hadn’t even had a decent dinner. To carry out that specific sequence of actions, he had to carry the detective to the bathroom, leave their now-intertwined hands and abandon the warmth of the bed.

Gavin’s heartbeat was slowly dropping and so was the rhythm of his breathing. He seemed tired and ready to fall asleep at any moment.

He could have postponed the human’s care until the next day.

Nothing would have happened if Gavin hadn’t brushed his teeth or showered for a day. On the other hand, his tests indicated that his dental enamel was sufficiently healthy: Gavin’s mouth was healthy and, probably after contact with the sterilizing fluid from his saliva, it must also have been quite clean.

He kissed his temple, where he would have had an LED if he had been an android, and held him warmly to himself.

“Gavin”, he timidly murmured .

The detective grunted in a nod as he snuggled his nose on his neck, breathing in the smell of the android’s hair: “Yep?”.

“Can I come home with you tomorrow?”

Gavin snickered into his shoulder and let go of his hand to embrace his solid torso and rest his ear on his chest, where his thirium pump was now steadily beating. He could hear the sound of his internal fans kicking in and the accelerated beat of his artificial heart.

“Yeah. You can come home tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after”, he snuggled close, squinting his eyes in a failed attempt at a wink, “As long as you wish to stick around with this rabid raccoon you decided to adopt”.

Nines’ biocomponents buzzed with joy.

After a few minutes, the door creaked open and the blankets folded under the soft paws of Princess, who had leaped onto the mattress to curl up at the footboard. Scruffy followed her soon after but simply climbed onto the bedside table and snuggled into a furball, staring curiously at his owner.

“Okay, I get it, everyone sleeps now”, Gavin stroked the red cat’s head affectionately and then caressed Nines’ nape, letting his hand rest there.

To Nines, it was a delight hearing the detective’s voice finally relaxed, almost tempted by sleep and fatigue, and at the same time feeling his fingers close to his port. Being touched in a place that intimate and sensitive with so much love and care was enough to make him metaphorically melt.

Gavin seemed unaware of his thoughts and caressed his short hair: “When they come here, it means it’s time to sleep. Sorry baby, it’s bedtime”.

Nines grinned.

He looked at his HUD, happily clearing all the notifications of his system, and hugged Gavin when he saw a single command appear at the top right of his mind palace.

**→ [ SLEEP ]**

For once, he didn’t want to go to work the next day.

He wanted to stay home for the weeks to come and spend all his precious time cuddling with Gavin and his cats. Maybe the detective’s influence played tricks on him when combined with his deviancy.

Not that he minded.

He was happy.

_Who knew it would all start with a coffee stain._


End file.
